Orientalism

by Edward W. Said

Flaubert frankly acknowledges that this is grotesquerie of a special kind. “All the old comic business”—by which Flaubert meant the well-known conventions of “the cudgeled slave … the coarse trafficker in women … the thieving merchant”—acquire a new, “fresh … genuine and charming” meaning in the Orient. This meaning cannot be reproduced; it can only be enjoyed on the spot and “brought back” very approximately. The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l’Égypte called “bizarre jouissance.” The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness.